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| Writing Workshops |
| | Coming Home: writing from the soul
- a winter retreat for women |
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Coming Home: writing from the soul -a winter retreat for women was an amazing experience. Please visit Friends
for few comments, a prediction and a photo, truly, of friends.
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| | The University of Iowa’s Summer Writing Festival |
| | This June and July, I’ll be teaching the following:
Exercises in Memoir: Projecting People, Projecting Places
Weeklong Workshop: June 27-July 2
Your past - those experiences that make you you- is framed by the people you know and the places you’ve been.
Your memories, your emotional makeup, your place in today’s world are the result of a rich mixture of people and places.
That’s why successful memoir yields descriptions so vivid readers meet the people you’ve known and walk through the
places you’ve been. We’ll develop complex characters and dialogue that works. We won’t just retrace the places in your life;
we’ll experience them via emotion and the senses. As well, we’ll go to those non-structural places that so powerfully shape
stories. We’ll also discuss the thorny memoir issue: "What if my memories don’t quite jive with everybody else’s?"
Helping Beginners Give Life to the People in Their Memoirs
Weekend Workshop: June 26-27
So you have all these stories to tell about the people in your life. But how do you move them from your memory onto the printed
page without losing the rich flavor that makes each of them worthy of inclusion in your work? We’ll take a three-pronged approach.
First, we’ll develop descriptions so vivid your reader will come to recognize each person. Second, we’ll create dialogue so strong
and engaging your reader can sit in on their conversations. Finally, we’ll consider that each person is a bundle of complexity-happy
and sad, laughing and growling, good and not-so-good. Playing on those sometimes conflicting personality traits introduces your
reader to the whole person. Together, we’ll watch the people in your life emerge into real-time characters with hearts and souls.
Helping the Beginner Take Smaller Pictures
Weekend Workshop July 17-18
One common problem beginning writers experience, usually without realizing it, is trying to tell us everything at once. We
get the big picture, but that’s just skimming the surface. We know the story’s outline but miss the richness of the story.
There’s no marvelous detail or vibrant conversations. Characters never unfold on the pages and the places we visit lack soul.
Nothing invites us in. So what to do? Whether your love be memoir, novel or non-fiction, the mantra remains: Take your time,
allowing your story to unfold by getting up close and personal. That captures readers. First, we’ll discover the difference
between taking big pictures and those smaller, vibrant ones hidden within big-picture blandness. Then, we’ll break down our
own big pictures and breathe life into the smaller ones that emerge.
If those classes aren’t what you’re looking for, there are hundreds more in almost every genre, all taught by quality instructors.
Registration begins this month.
For more information: www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/iswfest
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The Writers’ Group
The nine writers I meet with for two hours a month had their mettle tested with their latest assignment,
thanks to Thinking about Memoir by Abigail Thomas. Take any 10 years of your life, reduce that decade to
two pages [single-spaced, typed] with one sentence per line-and each sentence being three words long-not two, not four,
but three. You’ll discover there’s nowhere to hide and that you can’t include everything. But half of writing is
deciding what to leave out, right?
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